Project Description

Translating via spreadsheets

Not all translators are comfortable with using PO-editors such as Poedit or translation tools like Transifex. For them this package provides simple tools to
convert PO-files to xlsx-files and back again. This also has another benefit:
it is possible to include multiple languages in a single spreadsheet, which can be
helpful when translating to multiple similar languages at the same time (for
example simplified and traditional chinese).

The format for spreadsheets is simple:

If any message use a message context the first column will specify the
context. If message contexts are not used this column will be skipped.

The next (or first) column contains the message id. This is generally the
canonical text.

A set of columns for any requested comment types (message occurrences, source
comments or translator comments).

A column with the translated text for each locale. Fuzzy translations are
marked in italic.

The first row contains the column headers. ``xls-to-po`` uses these to locale
information in the file, so make sure never to change these!

Catalog to spreadshseet

Converting one or more PO-files to an xls file is done with the po-to-xls
command:

po-to-xls nl.po

This will create a new file messages.xlsx with the Dutch translations. Multiple
PO files can be specified:

po-to-xls -o texts.xlsx zh_CN.po zh_TW.po nl.po

This will generate a texts.xlsx file with all simplified Chinese,
traditional Chinese and Dutch translations.

po-to-xls will guess the locale for a PO file by looking at the Language
key in the file metadata, falling back to the filename of no language informatino
is specified. You can override this by explicitly specifying the locale on the
commandline. For example:

po-to-xs nl:locales/nl/LC_MESSAGES/mydomain.po

This will read locales/nl/LC_MESSAGES/mydomain.po and treat it as Dutch
(nl locale).

You can also use the -c or --comments option with one of those choices:
translator, extracted, reference, all to add more column in the
output.

Spreadshseet to catalog

Translations can be converted back from a spreadsheet into a PO-file using the
xls-to-po command:

xls-to-po nl texts.xlsx nl.po

This will take the Dutch (nl) translations from texts.xls, and (re)create a
nl.po file using those. You can merge those into an existing po-file using
a tool like gettext’s msgmerge.